Re: Blockbusting news, results get worse

Norman Diamond
2003-10-27T09:46:21Z

Eric Mudama wrote:

> 1. Pay a premium for longer warranty.

I've commented on this already.

> 2. Do qualification tests yourself during the first year of operation.

Yeah, I need to deliberately damage one block in order to test the firmware,
but I don't want to damage multiple blocks and use up the reallocation
space. I am a home user, even if I also do programming at work, even if I
also volunteer one day each weekend to test Linux. How can I arrange to
damage one block on a disk?

> 3. Look at what products are being shipped in large volume from OEMs, and
> buy the same product yourself. Dell or HP or IBM can't afford to ship
> products that don't have the lowest in-the-field failure rates, so buying
> what they buy would make sense since they'll run their own tests like #2.

I'm not sure how many Dell notebooks you'll have to open to see a Toshiba
drive, but I'll bet the number is low. Also do you recognize the name
Toshiba as a large maker of notebook PCs, and do you have any guesses as to
how many Toshiba notebooks you'll have to open to see a Toshiba drive?
Toshiba already reduced their former US 3-year warranties to 1 year and
provide 0 warranty directly to customers in Japan. (Maybe they should
follow the ideas of a certain dominant software maker and pretend to have a
90-day warranty but in fact renege every time a failure occurs? There would
be 0 difference in what needs to be done in software to make up for it.)